1.
Included in the
first volume (Ka) of the Collected Works of Tsongkhapa
(Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center); Thurman (1981) contains authentic
translations of Tsongkhapa's own short descriptions of his
intellectual and spiritual life.

2.
The investigation
into tattva (Tib. de kho na) seeks an essential
identity (Sk. sva-bhāva, Tib. rang gi ngo bo/rang
bzhin) in a unique thing (Sk. bhāva, Tib. dngos
po), and the investigation into tathatā (Tib. de
bzhin nyid) an essential reality (ātman, Tib.
bdag) uniting all things, particularly as the known objects of
a single act of fully enlightened knowledge. Napper (1989) reviews a
series of intellectual exchanges between Alex Wayman and Geshe Lhudup
Sopa that elucidate what Tsongkhapa means by khyab
che ba and khyab chung ba.

3.
The primary
feature defining Buddhist philosophical literature that makes an
investigation into right and wrong interpretations of the list of
Mahāyāna abhidharma categories (Sk.
rūpādi), is the structure given by the triad:
basis, path, and result (Sk. vastu, mārga,
phala, Tib. gzhi, lam, 'bras
bu). From the perspective of the elite scholastic philosopher for
whom it is axiomatic that there is a meaningful result (liberation or
enlightenment) reached through a meaningful program of praxis (the
path), the problem is soteriological: explaining the unity of the
final perceiving subject (the mind of an enlightened being) arrived at
through the series of diverse mental states leading up to that
climax. Each later moment leads up to the climax. It is a greater
knowledge than each preceding knowledge, existing in its own discrete
historical moment (in its own present) along the course of the
path. The enlightened mind that results from these linked states of
every greater knowledge is defined principally as direct and
non-conceptual. It does not just remember earlier knowledge, but knows
it as it knows its own present state (in the present, as it were). The
primary aim motivating those developing a fully enlightened mind
without an absolute value is leading others to that final state free
of all duḥkha (“suffering” in the widest
sense of the term). To do so those with such knowledge must know the
earlier knowledge-states perfectly, not just mediated through the idea
of them, as memories.